Video Playback Configuration and Troubleshooting

Last update: May 13, 2024

CREATED FOR:

Intermediate
Developer

When you upload a video to the DAM and add it to your channel, you might encounter issues in which the video may not play in the AEM Screens Player.

The following sections describe how to debug and troubleshoot video playing in your channel.

DAM Renditions

After you upload the video to the channel, AEM should start creating some renditions for it. You can view your videos under Assets.

To view the video:

Navigate to your video, for example http://localhost:4502/assets.html/content/dam/we-retail/en/videos.
Click the video and expand the top-left menu and click Renditions.

There should be different renditions (an MP4 or M4V).

If there is no rendition, make sure you have FFMPEG installed on the OS where AEM is running.

CAUTION

If there is no rendition, make sure you have FFMPEG installed on the OS where AEM is running.

Click here to install FFMPEG.

Video Assets

If you do not see a source attribute under video, it could be that the video did not get trans-coded. If the video is transcoded properly, it appears in the dashboard, as shown in the following:

Check that FFMPEG is installed and the video profiles.

chlimage_1-2

Checking Video Profile

Navigate to the Video Profile, that is, http://localhost:4502/etc/dam/video.html and click Upload Test Video.
Upload a test video and click Ok so you can begin the transcoding.

If the transcoded video fails, expand the FFMPEG output to understand any errors in the console output of FFMPEG.

Also, if the video transcodes successfully can download the transcoded file.

NOTE
Make sure you give sufficient time for the video to transcode (it should show the new tag instead of processing) before you add it to any channel.

Checking Profile with a Video Component

Check the list of profiles from the page design if the video component is not configured properly.

Navigate to your channel and click the Design mode.
Click the video and open the Edit dialog. Open the Profiles tab.

NOTE
Click different profiles (at least the “High Quality H.264” profile should be there).

Checking the Video in the Web Player

Use the Web Player http://localhost:4502/content/mobileapps/cq-screens-player/firmware.html/content/screens/we-retail/locations/demo/flagship/single/device0 to validate playback in browsers (Chrome and Safari). Chrome is used on Android™ devices while Safari is the OS X and iOS browser.

If the video does not run on Safari, it does not run in the OS X and iOS players either. This issue is likely an encoding issue and the video must be re-encoded.

To use a DAM workflow to create FullHD renditions, do the following:

Navigate to the workflow model admin that is http://localhost:4502/libs/cq/workflow/admin/console/content/models.html/etc/workflow/models.
Click the Screens Update Asset model.
Click Start Workflow from the action bar.
From the Run Workflow dialog box, click your video asset in the Payload.
Click Run.

NOTE

Allow some time to create the renditions, but after a few seconds/minutes (depends on video size), reload the web player on Safari.

Troubleshooting Autoplay Policy Flag

In case the AEM Screens Player picks up the video but does not display, troubleshoot the Autoplay Policy flag.

Follow the steps below to troubleshoot Google’s autoplay policy flag issue:

Navigate to chrome://flags/#autoplay-policy
Change Autoplay policy from Default to no user gesture is required
Relaunch your Web browser and update the player

NOTE

To learn more about best practices for good user experiences with the new autoplay policies in Chrome. See Autoplay Policy Changes at https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2017/09/autoplay-policy-changes#webaudio.

Syncing Video across Multiple Players

To play videos synchronously across multiple devices, you should use the absolute strategy for the sequence the video is part of.

Requirements

identical 2+ players
ideally similar hardware
identical network topology (players are connected to an NTP server that aligns their internal system clocks)

Setting up the absolute strategy

The absolute strategy:

Computes an anchor time (midnight of the current day).
Computes the duration of the sequence (sum of duration of all its items).
At any point in time, it computes which item should be currently played and the next item by solving sequence _remaining_time = (current_time - anchor_time) % sequence_duration.

Follow the steps below to set up an absolute strategy:

Navigate to your channel author and click the sequence component as shown in the figure below.
Open its configuration dialog.
Edit the Strategy and add absolute.

NOTE
The OS of the players must have the same clock.

Aligning Clocks on OS X Follow the steps below to align the clocks on OS X:

Open Date & Time preferences on each OS X box
Check Set date and time automatically
Paste value 0.pool.ntp.org, 1.pool.ntp.org, 2.pool.ntp.org, 3.pool.ntp.org, time.apple.com in the dropdown or simply run sudo ntpdate -u -v 0.pool.ntp.org
Start the 2+ players

It may take some time before the players start a new aligned sequence.

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